Lead Designer

We're the tiny team behind open-source projects like Tailwind CSS, commercial products like Tailwind UI, and the book Refactoring UI. We're hiring a lead designer to help us design and develop new UI tools that empower people to build websites and applications that inspire them.

About the job

Even though we spend most of our time building tools, at our core we're a design company. We're looking to add another full-time designer to the team to help elevate our existing projects to the next level, and to shape and develop the future of our tools and products.

Here are a few recent projects you might have worked on if you were already part of the team:

• Designing application home screen examples for Tailwind UI
• Designing a new checkout experience for Tailwind UI
• Designing Tailwind Play, our online sandbox tool
• Redesigning the Tailwind CSS homepage for v2.0
• Coming up with a logo and visual identity for Headless UI
• Designing the official Heroicons website and coming up with a user experience for rapidly finding and copying the icon you're looking for in both raw SVG and JSX
• Producing a promotional trailer for Tailwind CSS v2.0
• Building the new color palette for Tailwind CSS v2.0, designing dozens of real-world example interfaces to test it out and ensure end-users would have success with it

...and here's a grab bag of things you might work on soon after you joined:

• Spearheading a new e-commerce package for Tailwind UI by researching and cataloging common e-commerce UI patterns, mapping out component categories, and designing the new components and page examples
• Designing a multi-user invitation/management feature for Tailwind UI team accounts
• Designing an interface for selecting between multiple color palette options in Tailwind UI
• Designing a proper documentation website for Headless UI
• Designing example interfaces for our educational YouTube content
• Illustrating new thumbnails for the Tailwind UI table of contents to better match our updated Tailwind CSS v2.0 branding

You'd also contribute directly to the strategy and creative phase of brand new ideas, for example designing and developing Tailwind CSS website themes and starter kits later this year. You'd help us with some of the challenges we expect to face when developing these products, like:

• Figuring out what the pain points are in existing theme products, and what we can do differently to make our themes a better experience
• Deciding what the overall strategy for themes and starter kits should be — is it better to offer many hyper opinionated kits that target different project types, or a small set of kits that each have their own unique visual style but can be adapted to many types of projects?
• Designing an approach to customization that feels intuitive and flexible without feeling like you have to learn some complex proprietary configuration system
• Interviewing customers to find out what they are using our existing products for and inventing ways we can solve those problems even better that our customers haven't imagined

Even though we're fully remote, we're a very collaborative company and spend a lot of time working through problems in real-time using Figma as our virtual whiteboard, and fine-tuning designs in the browser over Tuple until they're just right.

You'd work directly with lots of different people on the team, including Steve if you're helping him iterate on a UI idea he can't quite crack, or someone on the engineering team like Adam to figure out a tricky responsive design issue.

About you

We're looking for someone with expert-level user interface and visual design skills who sweats the details and is obsessed with quality.

You might not identify as a front-end developer, but you understand the platform and have whipped together your share of little websites. Hopefully with Tailwind CSS!

You're a strong communicator, and you can get your ideas across clearly and persuasively in writing. We're a fully remote team, so async written communication is super important.

You're a quick learner who is energized by the challenge of trying something new. Producing a ridiculous trailer for the first time in your life with software you've never used before gets you excited, and you strive to achieve excellence even with unfamiliar problems.

In addition to UI design, you've got other complementary skills that can really add a lot to a tiny team like ours. Maybe you're a fantastic illustrator, are great at 3D modelling, can create beautiful animations, produce amazing video content, or are an incredible teacher or marketer. We're only 6 people, so while we all have our specialties, we all make use of our hidden talents, too.

Most importantly, you just love to make stuff. You get excited about experimenting on a new idea, and love the feeling of putting it out into the world to see what people will do with it.

Pay and benefits

This is a fully remote, full-time (40 hour per week) position, open to anyone with at least 4 hours of overlap with the Eastern Time Zone during a normal work day.

The salary for this position starts at $125,000 USD (or $160,000 CAD) for someone with excellent UI design skills and goes up to $175,000 USD (or $220,000 CAD) for someone who can really level up our team in a big way outside of a purely interface design role. The salary is paid in your local currency — we'll do the currency conversion when you're hired and deal with any exchange fluctuation on our side.

The position includes 4 weeks (20 days) of paid time off, plus 10 additional days for local national holidays. You're also free to take additional time off here and there as needed for any reasonable reason, like of course if you are sick, but also if you need the morning off to take your pet to the vet, or need an afternoon off to drive a loved one to the airport, whatever. At the end of the day all that matters to us is that we're making progress on what we're building together — we're not interested in tracking time.

We are committed to working at a sustainable and healthy pace, and we believe 6-8 hours is more than enough time to get a solid day's work done.

We will buy you any equipment you need to do your best work, including a computer, external display, office chair — whatever you need. If you need to rent a desk at a co-working space, we'll pay for that as well.

We're a Canadian company, so the position is permanent/full-time in spirit but a contract role on paper since we can't actually hire anyone outside of Canada as a traditional employee. That means it does not include certain benefits like health insurance or a retirement plan, so we've tried to account for that in the compensation.

How to apply

To apply, write something specifically for this position that tells us why we're a great fit for each other, and what you see the future being like if we work together. Please showcase 2–3 projects you've worked on recently and tell us what you think we should know about them. If you've got anything you designed, developed, and shipped entirely by yourself, we'd really love to see it and hear the story.

We don't ask for your resume but that doesn't mean we're not interested in what you've worked on in the past, we're just leaving it up to you to tell your own story the way you want to tell it.

We understand that not everyone has the same amount of time to dedicate to their application (I work from home with a two year old!), so don't feel like you need to spend 10 hours on it to stand out. As long as you sound like someone who could be a great fit when we're actually working together day-to-day with the same time constraints, we really want to meet you.

Give us a link to whatever you put together in the "Your application" field when applying.

We're accepting applications until January 28, 2021 at 10pm EST. We're planning to start interviews early February, and aiming for a start date of late March.

Can't wait to hear from you!